Playing an unnamed man in the grips of madness, Russell Crowe lords over Unhinged in a stifling, monotonous manner. The film is predominantly a survey of the actor’s profound bulk, placing him in ill-fitting clothes and lingering on his puffy red face and watery eyes and burly beard, especially as the character chokes down pills for unspecified reasons. Said bulk is emphasized to communicate the man’s bitterness and rage and to, more distastefully, underscore the vulnerability of the victims he beats, stalks, and murders over the course of the film’s running time, all of whom appear to be roughly 1/100th the size of Crowe.
Self-distortion, via makeup, padding, or actual modifications of the body, are as old as the performing arts themselves. But no one is going to mistake Derrick Borte’s film for Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, or Michael Mann’s The Insider. Unhinged is a vile VOD-in-spirit road rage thriller that inexplicably features a significant actor who’s given license to double down on the least savory aspects of his reputation. Crowe is a remarkably volatile presence who often seems, like Mel Gibson, to be fueled by an interior wellspring of aggression, which The Insider allowed him to examine at length, offering a portrait of a tormented man who harnesses his emotions for survival. By contrast, Unhinged encourages Crowe to revel in violence without examination, in the process fetishizing his frequent inability to connect with other actors on screen.
Borte and screenwriter Carl Ellsworth also have no interest in what makes Crowe’s character tick, presenting a stupid but potentially wild and evocative premise with utmost and unearned solemnity, pretending to mine the anger coursing through our nation. Unhinged opens with real-life examples of road rage, which are presented in this context as incidents in an ongoing epidemic. But this montage is pointedly lacking in empathy for those who are destroyed in these collisions, as it’s meant to derive base reactions of “holy shit!” and “WTF!”
After a round of throat-clearing that acquaints the viewer with future casualties, a single mother, Rachel (Caren Pistorious), and her teenage son, Kyle (Gabriel Bateman), run afoul of Crowe’s The Man on the side streets of New Orleans, while Rachel is attempting to escape that modern hellscape that is a freeway in the morning. The Man has already murdered a family and doesn’t take lightly to Rachel’s beeping her horn at him when he pauses at a traffic light and savors in the full tilt of his lunacy. And so a game of cat and mouse, recalling portions of Steven Spielberg’s Duel and Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher, is kicked into motion.
Unhinged has a few chilling moments that tap into everyday fears, particularly when The Man pulls up in his huge truck alongside Rachel’s vulnerable little beater right after she’s beeped at him. This moment is Crowe’s best in the film, as it allows the actor to suggest that The Man might, for a moment, be battling his blood lust, and it also cannily fuses slasher conventions with a real social awkwardness: of being stuck in traffic near someone with whom you’ve just had an argument. But the filmmakers soon exhaust that sense of invention, and Unhinged becomes a pummeling orgy of car accidents and domestic violence.
The film is also reminiscent of Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down, which similarly followed an entitled white guy who’s not nearly as powerless as he perceives himself to be. And while Unhinged knows The Man’s sociopathy, a notion that seemed to get away from Falling Down, it’s nevertheless intoxicated with his brutal wrath, and with Crowe’s obsessive devotion to it. The Man’s self-pity has political implications in a time that has brought us such absurdities as All Lives Matter, but Borte and Ellsworth only cynically and shallowly trade on such implications. Unhinged is essentially a nihilistic, style-free destructo-rama that’s designed to make us feel like shit. Which in 2020 means that the film is also colossally redundant.
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